January 14, 2025
Ben Nicholson
A woman repeatedly fails a Captcha test and starts to wonder whether she is, in fact, a robot in the high concept identity crisis drama, I’m Not a Robot.
January 13, 2025
Patricia Boero
Just released in the U.S., ‘Oceans Are the Real Continents’ is an exquisite love poem to Cuba, where three generations struggle to survive daily life in a small rural town.
January 13, 2025
Patricia Boero
Los oceános son los verdaderos continentes es un exquisito poema de amor a Cuba, donde tres generaciones luchan por sobrevivir y sueñan con escapar, representado en una serie de cuadros de la vida cotidiana en un pequeño pueblo rural.
December 9, 2024
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
‘Until the Orchid Blooms’ is a fine exploration of the battle between modernism and tradition set in a Cambodian community.
December 9, 2024
Adham Youssef
As Saudi Arabia’s film industry continues to grow, Hamzah Jamjoom is playing a part in shaping its future.
December 9, 2024
Clarence Tsui
Bowing at the Singapore International Film Festival, Chen-hsi Wong’s second feature ‘City of Small Blessings’ is a film of delicate visuals and nuanced performances, but uncertain messaging.
December 5, 2024
Clarence Tsui
A vengeful labourer’s plan to kill his manipulative foreman gives way to empathy for the rural poor in lawyer-turned-filmmaker Murat Firatoglu’s solid directorial debut.
November 29, 2024
Deborah Young
A troubled, politically entangled premiere in Venice’s Giornate degli Autori has partly overshadowed Rusudan Glurjidze’s wistful Georgian comedy that cleverly targets Georgian-Russian relations.
November 29, 2024
Deborah Young
The director of Georgia’s International Film submission ‘The Antique’ discusses the film’s difficult Venice debut and modern-day censorship from Russia.
November 26, 2024
Max Borg
TFV spoke with Mohammad Rasoulof about his latest film, the award-winning ‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’.
November 23, 2024
Adham Youssef
Returning after last year’s dramatic cancellation, the 45th edition of the long-running Cairo festival had a rich international program but a special focus on strong films from Africa, the Middle East, Palestine and Egypt itself.
November 22, 2024
Stephen Dalton
The Cairo jury gave their main prize to Romanian director Bogdan Muresanu’s tragicomic Cold War period piece ‘The New Year That Never Came’, but local writer-director Noha Adel earned the most awards and warmest reviews with her bittersweet female-driven ensemble drama ‘Spring Came Laughing’.
November 17, 2024
Stephen Dalton
The Ukrainian director of accidental one-shot war documentary ‘Real’ talks to The Film Verdict about war and peace, boycotting Russian propaganda, and Donald Trump’s prospects for ending the conflict.
November 17, 2024
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
‘Shadow Scholars’ introduces a serious issue plaguing academia, but the Eloise King documentary isn’t quite ready to point a finger at the African component of the problem.
November 16, 2024
Ben Nicholson
Delivered in his typically playful style, John Smith’s latest film, Being John Smith, is a wry reflection on the conventionality of his name dotted with radical flourishes.
November 16, 2024
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
Director Lidija Zelovic’s main assets in the often powerfully meditative documentary ‘Home Game’ are her novelistic voice and strong writing.
November 16, 2024
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
Shakespeare’s words and Cheek By Jowl’s directing are the highlights of Sophie Fiennes documentary.
November 14, 2024
Stephen Dalton
The outgoing head of IDFA, the world’s biggest documentary festival, Orwa Nyrabia insists non-fiction cinema must balance pragmatism and radicalism, mainstream and marginal voices.
November 14, 2024
Deborah Young
A stubborn boy searches all over Palestine for a lost pigeon in ‘Passing Dreams’, Rashid Masharawi’s unexpectedly gentle, non-confrontational allegory about the state of the country.
November 13, 2024
Adham Youssef
The new man behind the 45th festival wants films to be seen beyond central Cairo.
November 4, 2024
Deborah Young
200 miles from the Egypt-Gaza border, the city on the Nile prepares to open the curtain.
October 28, 2024
Carmen Gray
Thomas Riedelsheimer brings land artists and physicists together in a considered, densely packed doc celebrating the elusive nature of light as a medium.
October 4, 2024
Clarence Tsui
The Maw Naing’s second fiction feature, ‘MA – Cry of Silence’, is a riveting cri du coeur about life under authoritarian rule in Myanmar, seen through the struggle of aggrieved factory workers against their abusive employers.
September 29, 2024
Stephen Dalton
Several generations of women are stalked by the same creepy family curse in Spanish director Pedro Martín-Calero’s stylish, prize-winning psycho-horror debut ‘The Wailing’.
September 26, 2024
Deborah Young
Mike Leigh returns from a lengthy excursion shooting period films to the kind of chamber piece he excels in, in ‘Hard Truths’, a small story about family dysfunction magnified into high drama by Mariane Jean-Baptiste’s formidable lead performance as a wife and mother going over the edge.
September 25, 2024
Lucy Virgen
Costa-Gavras, in top form at 91, starts another revolution, this time about death, with ‘Last Breath’.
September 25, 2024
Stephen Dalton
Un jockey campeón se embarca en un viaje surrealista de desafío de género en el disparejo pero elegante, colorido y divertido thriller cómico de Luis Ortega.
September 24, 2024
Deborah Young
The killing of a Mexican cartel boss puts his 4-year-old son in danger in a powerful, often mythic evocation of life lived on the edge of death, Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez’s engrossing drama ‘Sujo’.
September 24, 2024
Deborah Young
Cuando la despensa está vacía, una familia de clase media en un país latinoamericano sin nombre, primero pasa hambre y luego se vuelve salvaje en ‘Zafari’. La espeluznante fábula distópica de Mariana Rondón hará que los espectadores no quieran cenar.
September 24, 2024
Deborah Young
Un ensayo imaginativo y fascinante sobre el feminismo y la maternidad, ‘La virgen roja’ de Paula Ortiz presenta a una inolvidable Najwa Nimri como una madre infernal y dominante que ve a su brillante hija de 16 años como una escultura que ha creado para cambiar el mundo en la España de los años 30.
September 23, 2024
Patricia Boero
Una historia conmovedora y divertida sobre dos mujeres solitarias que se conectan a través de la división de clases, con la actuación excepcional de Paulina Garcia como una matrona rica y mandona que se desliza hacia la demencia.
September 23, 2024
Lucy Virgen
Veinticuatro años después de la primera denuncia por acoso sexual a un político en España, Iciar Bollaín cuenta la historia en Soy Nevenka con sensibilidad y urgencia. Sir Isaac Newton dijo que su perspectiva era mejor que la de sus antecesores porque estaba parado en hombros de gigantes. Las mujeres del movimiento #metoo, las que […]
September 22, 2024
Stephen Dalton
Acclaimed documentary director Joshua Oppenheimer makes his fiction feature debut with ‘The End’, an ungainly but wildly ambitious post-apocalypse musical co-starring Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, George MacKay and Moses Ingram.
September 21, 2024
Deborah Young
Festival favorite Kiyoshi Kurosawa remakes his own 1998 revenge thriller ‘The Serpent’s Path’ as a tasteful psychological horror film set in France, whose top-notch, mixed Franco-Japanese cast makes it worth watching.
September 20, 2024
Lucy Virgen
One of the most prominent Latin American film industries is under the chainsaw.
September 20, 2024
Lucy Virgen
Vibrant flamenco music redeems a weak narrative in Antón Alvarez’s directorial debut.
September 19, 2024
Max Borg
Australian stop-motion master Adam Elliot is back with his touching, humane second feature ‘Memoir of a Snail’, featuring the voice of Sarah Snook.
September 13, 2024
Kevin Jagernauth
2024 awards race takes shape as TIFF brings stars and prestige to the red carpet.
September 9, 2024
TFV Staff
The long, hot summer seemed reluctant to end as crowds returned to the Lido to see the stars and the Venice film selection.
September 9, 2024
Deborah Young
The birth of Italian porn films in the 1980’s is told as a sentimental, gently humorous biopic about porn entrepreneur Riccardo Schicchi in ‘Diva Futura’, a well-written romp made to cash in on its airbrushed sketches of adult film stars Moana Pozzi, Cicciolina and Eva Henger.
September 7, 2024
Deborah Young
Taiwan-born and New York-based producer Alex C. Lo seems to be everywhere on the A-list festival circuit.
September 6, 2024
Stephen Dalton
A kidnap thriller rooted in surveillance, voyeurism and the unkindness of strangers, Yeo Siew Hua’s third feature ‘Stranger Eyes’ is the first ever Singaporean film to compete for the Golden Lion in Venice
September 5, 2024
Deborah Young
Choosing a narrative style as austere and unforgiving as her OB-GYN heroine, rising Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili (‘Beginning’) plumbs the depths of female suffering and self-sacrifice in ‘April’, a festival film which, like its protag, is destined to be admired more than loved.
September 2, 2024
Stephen Dalton
Starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature ‘The Room Next Door’ is a minor-key but quietly profound meditation on love and death, pain and glory.
September 2, 2024
Clarence Tsui
A retired military sniper tries to atone for his murderous past in ‘Phantosmia’, Philippine auteur Lav Diaz’s poetic, reflective, modest yet visually captivating study of guilt and redemption.
September 1, 2024
Stephen Dalton
Ageing bad-boy auteur Harmony Korine’s latest experimental art-punk feature ‘Baby Invasion’ is a visually impressive but ultimately hollow exercise in jaded hipster nihilism.
August 31, 2024
Deborah Young
Three doctors of different political views struggle to treat soldiers returning from the front during WWI and combat a new menace, the Spanish flu, in director Gianni Amelio’s grimly shocking film about war’s after-effects, ‘Battleground’.
August 31, 2024
Stephen Dalton
French writer-director duo Zoran and Ludovic Boukherma go back to the 1990s with their operatic but flawed coming-of-age saga ‘And Their Children After Them’, adapted from a prize-winning novel.
August 30, 2024
Stephen Dalton
A horse racing champion embarks on a surreal gender-blurring ride in Luis Ortega’s bumpy but stylish, colourful, enjoyably goofy comedy thriller ‘Kill The Jockey’.
August 30, 2024
Deborah Young
The life, politics, music and relationship of cultural idols and revolutionary artists John Lennon and Yoko Ono are brilliantly blasted onscreen amid exploding shards of 1970’s Americana in Kevin Macdonald’s and Sam Rice-Edwards’ irresistibly original and high-energy documentary, ‘One to One: John & Yoko’.
